The Lame Duck Congress
Bartlet, Sam and Toby try to get a Test-Ban treaty (1) ratified before the new Senate comes into session but find that a lame-duck senator will not vote on the issue that he lost on. CJ starts calling "rogue states" "states of concern" (2). Ainsley convinces Sam to back legislation that would help small businesses fight employee fraud (3). Donna and other secretaries want tougher ergonomic standards in the workplace (4). Leo, Josh and Donna help arrange an unofficial meeting between Bartlet and a drunk Ukrainian official.
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The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (Last updated: 6/13/01)
The United States conducted the first-ever test of a nuclear weapon in July 1945. Less than a year later, the Acheson-Lilenthal report recommended the creation of an international authority to control nuclear weapons and to use inspections to contain them. In the decades since then, countries have negotiated over and considered various treaties to limit the spread of nuclear weapons.
On an international level, countries finally completed the negotiations of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996 and made it available for signing beginning September 24, 1996. President Bill Clinton signed for the United States that very day, as did the representatives of 69 other countries.
That signing ended just the first of three phases before the treaty is fully effective. The CTBT is now in the two-part preparatory phase. First, participating countries build an international monitoring and verification regime through sensor stations that will monitor the environment through four methods (seismic, hydroacoustic, infrasound, and radionuclide) to ensure that no one is violating the treaty; the United States conducts its monitoring through the Department of Energy's Nuclear Explosion Monitoring Research & Engineering program (NEMRE).
Second, signatory states must ratify the treaty; this is where the United States and many other countries have stalled. The Senate, which is the only body constitutionally authorized to ratify treaties signed by the president, voted down ratification on October 13, 1999 with a 51-48 vote (2/3 vote is required to pass). Some of the opposition to the CTBT is a response to tests by countries such as India and Pakistan, which conducted tests in 1999. As of June 2001, only 76 states have ratified the treaty. President George W. Bush reportedly is willing to let the treaty continue to stall and has no plans to push for another ratification vote.
Once the verification regime has been established and assuming the CTBT is eventually ratified by the necessary countries, which does include the United States, then the world moves into Entry-into-Force phase. The CTBT allows countries to sanction states that violate the treaty but in vague terms.
Even though the Senate did not ratify the CTBT, some have argued that its general policy of preventing countries from nuclear testing does still bind the United States until the United States makes clear its specific intent to no longer become a party to the treaty. In any case, regardless of how binding the CTBT may be, the United States has not tested a nuclear weapon since the fall of 1992, when Congress initiated a short-term moratorium. President Clinton extended the moratorium while in office and re-affirmed commitment to it after the Senate vote, and Bush has so far continued the moratorium into his administration.
Sources: The Department of Energy's Nuclear Explosion Monitoring Research & Engineering Program. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists. The Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty Organization's Preparatory Commission.
Rogue states v states of concern (last updated July 2001)
On June 19, 2000, Secretary of State Madeline Albright said in an interview that the United States had abandoned the expression "rogue states" in favor of "states of concern." The change, a State Department spokesman later elaborated, was to recognize that it was harder to classify different countries under the "rogue state" category and that some were making efforts to address certain problem areas.
"When all these states are opposed to the peace process and opposed to the international situation and opposed to any form of liberalization and democracy, it's easy to describe in one basket," spokesman Richard Boucher said. "What we see now is a certain evolution, different ways in different places. Some places that were described that way have embarked upon more democratic internal life; others have been willing to address some of the issues that are of primary concern to the United States; others have addressed partially issues like terrorism but not completed what the UN, in the example of Libya, has asked them to do in cooperation with the trial."
The label of "rogue state" has quietly re-entered the official political vocabulary with the Bush administration. For example, in a May 2001 press conference, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage said that the United States considers four countries - Iran, Iraq, Libya and North Korea - as rogue states.
Sources: Richard Boucher's June 19, 2000 press briefing, available on-line here.
Employee Fraud (Last updated July 2001)
Employee or occupational fraud takes many forms, from the administrators diverting corporate funds to the bank teller pocketing loose change. The cost and prevalence of such fraud are hard to measure, but a 1996 study by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners does provide some useful data.
According to the ACFE survey, which was based on 2,608 cases reported by the organization's members, fraud and abuse accounts for an estimated six cents on each dollar of annual revenue, which would amount to $400 billion lost nationwide to occupational fraud and abuse a year. Non-managerial employees account for most employee fraud (58%, as opposed to 30% by managers and 12% by owners) but cause a much lower median loss ($60,000, as opposed to $250,000 by managers and $1 million by owners/executives). Small businesses with 100 or fewer employees were the most vulnerable to fraud, and suffered a median loss of $120,000, close to that of larger businesses which suffered a loss of $126,000.
The largest fraud case in the ACFE survey was that of a 67-year-old owner of a savings and loan association who diverted millions of dollars to cover his own bad investments; the cost to taxpayers was $2.5 billion. The smallest was a 24-year-old bank-teller who took $22 from her cash drawer.
Due to employee fraud - and, perhaps more importantly, the rise of negligent hiring lawsuits against companies whose employees have committed crimes or other wrongs and who theoretically should have not been hired or kept on the job - some employers have taken to conducting more background checks through private services.
Sources: Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, Report to the Nation (1996), available on-line here.
Ergonomics (last updated July 2001)
Each year, according to estimates by the Occupational and Safety Health Administration, 1.8 million workers experience injuries related to overexertion or repetitive motion, and 600,000 are injured severely enough to require time off work.
To help address these problems in a wide range of industries - mostly manual handling and manufacturing jobs - OSHA spent the late 1990s developing a set of broad ergonomic standards regulating how workers who at risk of developing a musculoskeletal disorder should operate or what employers should do to help those workers who have already developed a disorder. In November 1999, it issued these standards.
Controversy quickly followed. Cost in particular was heated; OSHA estimated it would cost $4.5 billion for employers to comply with standards and that the standards would have annual benefits of $9.1 billion while preventing somewhere around 350,000 injuries a year; some private sources reportedly estimated that compliance would cost $100 billion.
The standards' reach was also unclear. The ergonomic standards mostly focused on manual handling and manufacturing jobs, but do apply to other industries as well. Repetitive stress injury - the musculoskeletal disorder linked to heavy keyboard use and which has led to many lawsuits against keyboard manufacturers - is just one part of ergonomics and was just one minor part of the OSHA standards.
Some also questioned how much OSHA needed to do, citing figures that there has been a decline in musculoskeletal disorders resulting in employees missing time from work in recent years. Employers reported about 582,300 such injuries in 1999, down from 592,500 in 1998 and more than 763,000 in 1993.
OSHA's rules were made final in November 2000 and took effect January 16, 2001. A few days later, George W. Bush took office and, on March 20, 2001, he repealed the rule. The standard was removed from the Federal Register a month later.
In operation since April 1971, OSHA now covers 105 million private-sector workers and employers at 6.9 million sites. OSHA's first standards dealt with exposure standards for toxic substances and catastrophic accidents. OSHA has dealt with ergonomics in specific injuries for years; in 1990 it reached settlements with auto manufacturers to implement ergonomics programs and it published standards for the meatpacking industry to deal with the high rate of injury there, and the incidence of recorded injuries resulting in days away from work has dropped 70 percent.
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